Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger is not far behind that. And there is nothing like mass hunger to destroy a society.
Esoteric problems in financial markets have real world consequences. We've gone nearly a century since the last real demonstration of that. Don't discount the possibility that the next demonstration will be within your lifetime. And in our more interconnected world, it's likely to be a lot worse.
https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.
(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)
That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
(~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size, the remainder will follow in time)
Do you think they should lose money? How would you be typing on a computer if that evil, evil company didn't make a profit?
There is a reason every communist society has failed.
Just like how pure communism doesn’t work, neither does pure capitalism.
The fertility crisis is an entirely individual crisis. You are a parent and you raise children
Your children's pension contributions are paid out to someone else, leaving less for you.
Having your own children no longer ensures your retirement, so you don't have them in the first place.
The problem couldn't be more individual than that.
Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.
Or are you focused pedantically on credit cards?
Food distribution will still continue until the raw resources necessary crap out. Shelves won't go empty immediately, but once there's no gas for the trucks and tractors, then you'll be happy to be near the Amish.
300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.
It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.
Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.
>Until you get cancer. >Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.
"I have a survival plan"
"if you get a terminal illness, you will die anyway, checkmate"
"Ok fine I will go somewhere with medical infrastructure"
"Idiot, there is no medical infrastructure"
At this point the whole discussion is illogical. If there are no doctors, then the survivalist strategy gives up nothing.
The initial strategy obviously works. If you get ill, you just need to make sure you've had children and that your children are healthy.
Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.
So far, it looks to be a way for slow extinction of a culture.
Reality often has a funny way of evading predictions.
but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.
This has been tried extensively e.g. in Germany, France, Sweden, Canada, …. It did not work out great.
And if you want to see how real Armageddon looks like, go visit Yubari: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABbari,_Hokkaido
The collapse was due to local coal mining no longer being viable, but it still demonstrates how it looks like when a city goes from 107000 people in 1960 to 5600 in 2025.
Large empty areas where homes and factories used to be, old billboards for stuff that no longer exists, whole school buildings and gymnasiums out of use and overgrown. Most shops closed or hardly open & few remaining occupied buildings in the middle of it.
Was a really special experience & the local coal mining museum was super interesting - just wondering for how long it can continue going...
The question really is - how does an abandoned town hurt us? Sure, there may be some sympathy and loss for "what once was" (same as the pictures of the abandoned classrooms in Prypiat).
The US has had similar things happen but the spread out population has given it some resiliency (many towns that "collapsed" when the mill/factory/whatever shut down continue in a strange afterlife as a suburb of a nearby city).
Is this a problem ? I guess not really & it might actually help the nature regenerate in those areas.
Where it can be a bigger problem is various small islands - where the islands being inhabited makes a big difference in territorial claims & is a very important thing in regards to what China has been doing (building artificial islands, etc.). For that reason I suspect the Japanese government subsidizes island communities quite heavily to keep them going & keeping suverenity over those islands and the surrounding sea.
Or are you joking? I hope so, because it takes a certain kind of stupid to not understand the very very bad things that a shrinking population would cause.
https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp_zenkoku...
And this was in a developed country well resourced to take the hit.
The horror.
What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.
The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?
I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.
I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.
The practicalities are that the places you can use the "tricks" (like homesteading still being valid, or mining claims, etc) are places where the land is so cheap as to be free (or nearly so, eBay has "land" available for a few dollars, because you pay lawyers $500 for the transfer and the land is somewhere in the Nevada desert).
Practical usable land (for some value of "you could grow things on it, and it's not a desert") seems to put a lower bound in the USA of about $1,000 an acre.
The problem is most people want said land to be within commuting distance of a job, where it jumps to $5-15,000 an acre.
When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.
When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.
This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?
History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.
> When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?
For much of human history I'd guess the answer was yes, because the size of the economy was based almost entirely on how much physical work people did, but the modern economy is very different from historical economies.
Soon we will discover. I suspect the answer will be no, at least not for long. Markets are made of people. Can the economy grow despite a shrinking market losing economies of scale everywhere? I hope, but I don't count on it.
It seems like you're recommending socialism without coming out and saying it?
Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.
It’s very simple.
If you make $1M in profit in a year and the following year you also make $1M but inflation was 3%, you earned 3% less money than you did the year before. The nominal profit was the same but the real profit was lower.
To earn the same real return with 3% inflation you would need to earn $1.03M the year after you earn $1M. If your profits grew less than inflation, you made less money and your company is worth less as a result.
Monetary policy people figures out that a small amount of controlled inflation that incentivizes investing is better than deflation which encourages people to hoard cash. Some people disagree with that.
When responding to a question, I choose to answer the question the person asked instead of another question they didn’t ask.
Add those two together and you will get a minimum positive return constraint on capital.
Capital can only pay a return if it is fully utilized. This means there needs to be enough demand to saturate the machine.
You can never have any form of excess capacity, because excess physical capital does not generate any returns. It actually loses you money, which is incompatible with the positive return constraint.
Since the expected return is positive, the lender has to pay back more than he borrowed, meaning that he has to have more revenue and more revenue is earned by selling more products.
Now, this alone doesn't explain the reason why you have to keep going though.
The question is, when someone demands positive returns and those returns are artificially anchored against zero thanks to the ZLB, why is this bad.
Well, think about what happens if nobody borrows the money. That means the money is still waiting for a borrower and it is not turning into demand. Now there is money missing in the economy. The rest of the money has to circulate faster to compensate the loss of money but it doesn't, because everyone is thinking the same thing.
The problem here isn't on the business side. The problem is that someone decided to use an unsigned integer for something that can be negative.
You need money for daily transactions. You don't care about the nominal value of the money as a "store of value", you care about it as a way to turn your illiquid work output into a liquid voucher you can redeem at any store.
Since modern society depends on money, having the money system degrade is similar to an internet or electricity outage.
So what happens instead is that the government takes on more debt because that is the logic of a zero lower bound.
It also forces the central banks to do QE, because there is nothing you can do at zero.
In both cases, the system is being flooded with the same defective money. Someone will hold onto it, due to their liquidity preference and the lack of negative interest rates.
Basically, the billionaires dislike it and hence are changing the message. They want you to be ants.
Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.
Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...
You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.
ai only solves labor, it doesn't solve human greed.
What are you concerned we would run out of?
Helium is probably more limited but for most cases there is alternatives I.e. I believe people use argon.
Idk none of this seems overly pressing in terms of preventing a lost scarcity world
Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.
You're not sure humans can enjoy better lives in the future? Like you think things could only get worse?
Given the constant productivity improvements, elder care is not something that can only be solved by having constantly growing populations.
Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.
how do phone shops like verizon or t-mobile stay open if people aren't buying? same for phone repair places? more layoffs
more laid off people means less people going out to dinner, ordering pizza, taking trips, buying new cars. those businesses close, and layoff people.
less workers means less tax revinue, either income tax, payroll tax, or sales tax (cuz people ain't buying shit). government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services. there are now less cops and more potholes.
how do billionaires, whose wealth depends on publicly traded companies and their stocks, keep making money when no one can buy anything? spacex and tesla can make up numbers and stay afloat, somehow, but most stocks will tank.
You don't. You only sell 50 million.
> this leads to layoffs
Why? 50 million people instead of 100 million also means half the employees in the factory, making just 50 million phones instead of 100.
> government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services
Yeah, but no layoffs (same reason as the phone factory). Fewer people need fewer services. Potholes are indeed a problem. Some roads leading to abandoned places will need to be abandoned as well.
> most stocks will tank
By your argument, those people that can't buy a second phone, also can't buy any stocks anyway. I see no problem here.
Fewer children mean all the industries and gov't services who are employed now to service children will need to downsize, these are lost jobs now before the fewer children grow to adults where they would take over those fewer jobs. All of this will have a effect across the economy.
Pediatricians, Teachers, Toys & Games companies, Children Furniture, School Supplies, Electronics, etc.... All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize. Again in the long run it works out, but in the short run say next 50 years for people in these markets will see downsizing over time. Can the rest of the economies pick that up?
Lots of new jobs will be needed in health and elderly care - you just ignored those.
> All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize.
Downsizing happens all the time. It's considered normal by most economists.
Yes, there are domains that are more affected than others. Reduction in population is slow enough to simply let the workers retire without hiring new ones.
You're acting like the birth rates are 0.2 instead of somewhere above 1 (too lazy to check). I remind you that Japan had lower birthrates than that for a very long time and nothing bad happend. In fact, their workplace conditions are improving. Salarymen are finally starting to work decent hours.
Why don't you admit that you're worried about your own quality of life at 70y old and you couldn't care less about future generations and their polution, resources, global warming, famine and refugee problems?
actually, less people would mean less traffic, and less wear on the roads, therefore also less potholes.
freezing and thawing can also be an issue, but obviously only in areas where it gets cold enough.
Heavy traffic causes depressions in the road. Water collects there and seeps into tiny cracks. Then it freezes, expands and makes the cracks bigger with every cycle.
It's also possible for potholes to form if the roads are continuously covered in snow that is compacted into ice. There is no direct damage from traffic. The expansion of ice creates tiny holes throughout the road.
All this relies on a basic subsistence right though, us all living in harmony on some commune. If the housing rental system remains in place and demands dollars even though no dollars are available to be gotten, then our landlord is probably going to choose to escalate to violence and won't take pizzas as payment. If the government is going to mandate rent payment in dollars without actually making any dollars available, we have a problem.
Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.
Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.
And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.
This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.
Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.
At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?
Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again.
So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.
Hospitals failing. Caloric intake failing. Yeh sure, why not? Let's just imagine that all high technology that acutally props up reproductive success seriously strained or even vanishing will result in things magically correcting.
The same attitudes that have negatively impacted fertility rates don't disappear because things get worse. They're reinforced by it. An economy that collapses because there aren't enough workers doesn't make people say "I want to have babies"... if the media is to be believed, people wait until the economy improves first. Why would that happen?
>So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium
All evidence to the contrary? We've actually run experiments with animals. After they crash, the stress and trauma imposed on them keeps them from reproducing at a behavioral level despite resources being abundant.
>Total extinction seems unlikely.
Based on what exactly? Your unwillingness to own up to plainly obvious but disturbing conclusions?
>Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society,
Short of time travel, we can't have a pre industrial society, as that's the society that comes at a point in history before industry. What we'd have would be a post-collapse society. They're not the same thing. They don't even resemble each other much.
When moose on the island are nearly wiped out and their predators starve to death, the moose can "swing back up" because moose never have low fertility. It's something like 25.0, give or take. They have a low population not because fertility went low... they have it because baby moose get eaten or starve or die from disease. Once those pressures ease up, the 25.0 fertility is still there and population rises quite rapidly.
When human fertility goes down, it means that humans can't ever bounce back. So unless you're hypothesizing some sort of thing which causes human fertility to rise paradoxically and inexplicably, this reply of yours makes no sense at all. Not even a little. By the time people like you realize how wrong you are, your species will be past the point of no return.
Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm? "Guess we wont try to live like people have for the last x million years, here is a good place to lay down and die."
Why would they be able to reinvent that, when none of their ancestors for how many generations did so? Is that something a person can do well, do you think, with no prior experience or expertise? What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?
We could ask why they could reinvent all the technologies that people from prior eras of agriculture could manage? Will they instantly be able to make their own ropes, do you think? Have you ever made rope? Does it not count as technology if it's not a transistor etched into a silicon wafer? But previous eras of history did utilized that quite a bit for their agriculture. Are they supposed to make due without? There must be a hundred different things they won't know how to do, but were necessary for agriculture in any era of history you might name, but that you can't name because you know nothing about it.
Technologies, ones so mundane that you don't even recognize they exist, permeate the world. They're lost and then they're gone because a replacement was better. But when the replacement disappears, those lost technologies don't spring back into existence magically. Civilization is "path dependent", it doesn't get knocked back to previous tiers because those previous tiers cease to exist once we've moved on to the next. And it's really hilarious to me that not only are you ignorant of this, but you're snarky about it too.
And do those assholes have enough spare time and effort and interest to raise families? Any women of reproductive age out there with them?
If not, this probably isn't the model that proves that human extinction is an unreasonable worry.
They've not lost their skill to survive sans tech - unlike, say, yourself.
Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c
Actually, I know alot more about this than you do. And what you call "minimal technology" is not the case at all. Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it? Why do you think it's "minimal technology"? But if you insist it is, I take it to mean that you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands, which is silly on its face. It's not just the bronze/iron/steel work. Now we're back to "can you make a rope?"... can you? I think with an hour or two you could make something. If I brought the tool for you to use. And if you had the fiber for it. But it takes quite alot of practice to get good at it, I'll never get there. And even if you had the tool (haha, sandcast one in iron for bonus points!), and had the practice, now you're a fucking hemp/jute/sissal/something farmer just to have enough fiber to make the ropes to plow, but you're no longer growing grain so you don't need the plow. Why is this minimal technology so uncooperative, do you think? Why do you need so many fucking specialties just to do subsistence farming? Maybe you should go out there like they did 12,000 years ago with a stone hoe and plant the seeds stooped over, one at a time. I'm sure the yields will be high enough with that that humanity's numbers can start growing again instead of shrinking.
>Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c
Cute, someone who watches video instead of reads. That's... I dunno. Maybe if you read, you'd understand how centuries ago this continent was so full of game that those Europeans who saw it were astounded, but now there's practically nothing left. Not enough to feed a recovering civilization with anyway. Even if they used firearms instead of the spear in that video. I'll even forgiven that now you've stepped back even further from the subsistence agriculture thing to hunting-and-gathering. Maybe humanity should crawl back into the ocean and become fish too... that's how we'll beat extinction.
So you say.
> Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it?
What, another one? We used oxen and draught horses rather than mules.
> you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands,
I live in Australia, I know where many working old ploughs are - most of the farms here still have them on display - there are several on this very property.
> Now we're back to "can you make a rope?
Sure - been there, down that, have you?
Look, this is getting dull - I'm 70, I grew up in a remote location, my father, still alive, born in 1935, fed his family as a child while his father was away at war - I've often spent months in remote areas.
In the event of the collapse of the modern US tech sphere some humans will get by, others will not.
That's not even counting those who can keep old Farmall tractors running on whatever they have laying around. It's not the greatest, but it's functional, and a mechanical horse is way more powerful than a real one - and even then, real ones are still quite capable of supporting more than subsistence.
I've renovated old old houses in Fremantle and flipped them with very few contractors (while working on bleeding edge code bases) and built air strips in the PNG highlands, worked with wood workers, glass blowers and metal workers, etc.
I suspect some people have spent a little too long behind screens and forgotten how to shear a sheep, draw, card, spin, and knit a jumper.
You can build a road an 18 wheeler can transit with manual labor, just slowly. And if you don't need to support more than a Jeep, the road can almost build itself.
Or another way - building a modern house with modern conveniences and efficiencies is pretty dependent on a ton of things.
Building a sufficient house in many parts of the world is dependent on manpower.
But on that matter of road building, here's a vague relative kitted up to travel and take photo's in 1920 or so: https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/1d5472eb9b8a4e3e...
and here's one of his images taken much the same time of a road and railway being built: https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/20d3070e95eb924a...
It's all manpower and horse drays - the really tough bits are dropping, chopping, and moving those trees, they're a bit bigger and tougher than they look.
If Lincoln wanted troops moved to the front, he needed rails, or lots of roads and time.
Now we can travel and communicate between vastly distant areas without intervening connections - you just need an airport in Perth and something resembling a landing strip in the Outback, and you have travel. Satellites and radio preclude the need for wires to be run.
If humans do go extinct, it's going to be from a lack of will rather than a lack of means.
Making rope is easier than getting the license to be allowed to farm industrial hemp.
Even if machines and electronics stop working, you can still extract their metals out of them without the effort of reducing ore from scratch. There are entire landfills waiting to be mined.
Then there is the fact that you're completely uninformed about rural life even just 150 years ago. They used very little steel tools and while the steel tools they did use were essential, the vast majority of them can be shared with the rest of the village.
Even just 200 years ago, most people lived off the land.
The idea that urbanisation turned all of humanity into a helpless class of humans is ridiculous.
The only real constraint is sufficient farm land to support a transition away from urban living, but when you think about it, even that is unnecessary, because there is no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined.
The moment you entertain even just a little bit of modern technology being preserved the argument makes no sense. The amount of power that you can capture with solar panels by far exceeds what human power and horse power can do. Solar panels are only considered inferior to fossil fuels due to the fact that you can burn fossil fuels on demand, whereas solar panels only produce during the day when the sun is out.
But that doesn't negate the fact that the amount of work solar panels can drive exceeds the work a human can do in a day. You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.
Harsh, I thought of it more as having an adorable level of cluelessness.
> no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined
Indeed, both for economies of scale and for the fact that existing modern farmlands are like butter to work - the major and minor tree roots of the past are gone, the rocks have been picked or sifted out, deep clays have been ripped up and mixed with sandy surface soils, etc. In this part of the world there are many 4,000 hectare farmlands made up of uniformly graded soils ready to work with less energy input than virgin land requires (whether with new or old methods).
Veering away from looking backwards:
We're also on the cusp of having self docking and charging autonomous agri bots running from battery farms - not quite there yet .. but "watch this space".
The trick with such things is keeping rent seeking cloud based VC's out of the loop and parts replaceable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM
>You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.
Which was never any assertion of mine. People are going to be the problem. Workers are going to be the problem. A shrinking population doesn't have a surplus. And while you're busy trying to build the slightly less efficient industrial society without enough people to run it, your population continues to shrink... meaning you have to downgrade again. But you never quite seem to downgrade enough, because right when you think you've struck the balance, you have fewer people necessitating another downgrade.
Remember all the posts here that talk about how the reason people don't have kids is that the economy's bad? They need more pay and more child care subsidies and diapers are too expensive and people would rather spend that money on themselves and blah blah blah? Do you think they're going to feel so prosperous in your "slightly less efficient industrial society"? They aren't going to be cranking out 8 or 10 babies. All the things you're doing to make it so that civilization can hang on a little longer make them miserable in ways that you all have identified as the disincentive to parenthood.
How is this not obvious to you? What sorts of willful denial of reality does it take to arrive at your conclusion? In my city of 350,000 people we have more dog groomers and pet stores than we do pediatrician clinics. They're closing elementary schools (the Facebook posts about these are hilarious, no one seems to get it). And you think that solar panels can fix what's broken (are there any solar panel factories in North America, come to that?).
Because they'd still have books and seeds and farming implements lying around? And maybe some actual farmers to learn from?
> What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?
Probably, yeah many will starve. Early English settlers in North America had very little farming experience and many died. Enough survived to build colonies.
Insisting that negative population growth necessarily means extinction is as silly as saying that positive population growth necessarily means people standing on people from coast to coast.
Choose to be the change you wanna see in the world and find other who want to do that and stop saying "woo be us" in public as it just doesn't help.
The world is the way it is because we complain and consume too much and act & care too little. But change always starts with you and first your attitude. And then well inspire others with your actions to make this world (one of ) the best versions it can be
If all they do is not have kids and claim that we are a cancer the minimum they could do is that other classic
Speaking is silver but silence is gold...
And well I firmly believe the biggest problem is the pervasive desire to be weak and complain by those who have the possibility of actual impact.
The battle is lost before it's fought and all.
But yeah we are being led by people with "inferior" visions for the world ~ Plato... But calling ourselves shit ain't gonna help it's just giving yourself and easy exit.
Maybe we, as a species, would have better long term outcomes if we reflected more before blindly charging forward exactly as our parents did (and their parents before them).
Maybe they feel we should choose a different course and look for better/different ways of living and being as a species. There is no such thing as infinite growth, we should probably act accordingly.
All I know from them is their words... Which I hope we can agree where kind of negative (I personally prefer not to be a cancer hbu ?)
There is no such thing "as a species"... It's not like we are ants... Some groups of humans/individuals are net neutral, some net positive and most net negative.
The question is always about incentives and externalities... and not what we as a nation/city/... Whatever prefer but what we are willing to stop doing...
At the end of the day the world is the way it is because the people who choose the game are the ones who keep playing it.
The thing that got me with his comment is that he based on his website is relatively succesful... Unlike this fake belief that billionaires hold all the power it is in general the 0.1% that hold the power... With the consent of rhe 9.9% and he's most likely 9.9% ...
This not having kids as a noble sacrifice is just choosing to be weak tbh unless he's actually tried but if that is the case it's definitely not in public.
The often quoted: "Infinite growth is the mentality of a cancer cell" is fairly accurate for describing human growth (when there is no real concern for any externalities such as environmental preservation or resource conservation). The abstract comparison does not bother me in the slightest.
Humans are a species like any other animal/insect. Ants have workers and drones, soldiers and queens (some ants evolved to do nearly nothing as a reserve work force). Trying to defining the worth of sentient beings based on abstract value functions (positive/negative, success/failure) is a narrow and sad way of looking at the world.
I have no idea what "game" you are referring to. Are you talking about life? I think that is a sad way to look at the world. Life isn't a game and there are many ways to live a good life while helping others (kin or not).
Not having children can be a noble sacrifice if someone is doing it to prevent passing on chronic illness or to prevent suffering. Someone caring for elderly parents and choosing to delay having children indefinitely does not make them "weak" as you like to suggest. Giving up something you want for the greater good of the world around you is worth understanding, maybe even worth emulating.
You seem to be looking at life and existence through an extremely narrow lens and judging people without really knowing anything about them. Hurling insults around casually as if you have everything figured out, which you do not (nobody does).
I would suggest you take time to talk to people more about their life and experiences before judging them so harshly. Try to hold back your insults and practice empathy instead; you might learn something about life and its vast breadth of expressions.
I would suggest you a mirror + ass out of you and me reminder... The human ability to know the motives about the other person is severely overestimated...
I wanted to have a friendly philosophical thought experiment / different pov with the original poster, if he had the time and desire to do so. instead you butted in and went into a full blown j'accuse style which was very unpalatable.
I wish you a nice day touching some grass and enjoying all the beautiful stuff a cancer iyho has created. Take care.
Personally, especially in the age of llm's, I wouldn't do so much projection and insinuation under a profile that is linked to your online/real identity.
While on the one hand strong opinions are generally appreciated, not too many people who consider themselves a cancer are looking for some to help them with "overall growth."...
I guess for some reason it struck a nerve and that's why you felt the need to continue (well and sunken cost phallacy obviously) but again no upside and unlimited downside.
Anyway if you're in vietnam hmu for a drink but imho do yourself a favor and stop trying to get imaginary internet points - we are all dogs (on the internet ...) for good or bad but you have a name.
Take care.
I don't come here for reddit. Have a nice day.
Not that I expect too much deep thinking of someone who chooses to call themself trumpdong...
A few quotes:
> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”
> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”
As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.
My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.
I think Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator is relevant and inspirational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20&t=2s
Thank you for sharing your article. It's from a view so unlike my own, and it's been eye opening.
If it happens on a societal level it's tremendously powerful.
What’s stopping you from being a welder or dentist?
What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.
Man, septic pumper tho…
Don't worry. It's temporary.
The last transition was British Empire to US and that was 1900-1945.
We can only hope for something better.
The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.
A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.
That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations.
In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth rates. That's the scary part because it means there's no equilibrium to be reached. Birth rates could, in theory, remain low until humanity ceases to exist.
Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.
Like the mice, our population is going into reverse. And that description of behavior, looks awfully prescient when I compare to humans on social media today...
How did you reach that conclusion?
> isn’t that catastrophising
Yes, I'm only putting that forward as the worst case scenario to make the point that this can't just be ignored. As I said in other comments, this almost certainly won't actually result in extinction because there are other corrective factors which would occur long before that, but none of those scenarios are particularly desirable either. (E.g. Civilizational collapse returning humanity to pre-industrical birth rates, global takeover by theocratic governments that ban birth control, etc.)
The only non-catastrophic corrective factors that sound plausible to me involve some kind of intentional collective action on our part that reverses the trend, which won't happen if everyone's attitude is the same as the root commenter's. (Granted, maybe there are other possible corrective factors I haven't thought of, but if so I'd like to discuss what those are rather than just have the problem dismissed with a hand wave.)
I don't fault your logic, but I don't want to accept that disaster is inevitable.
I thought this was common knowledge, but given the reaction I'm getting in this thread I guess it's not as common as I thought and I should have explained myself better in my original comment.
Granted that's not an imminent threat, it would take quite a few generations at current first-world birth rates. But I still find it a concerning long-term trend, and there are a lot of less severe negative consequences that could occur between now and then. If you care to dig into it more, this podcast episode has a good discussion of the short-term problems, which go beyond just elderly care: https://www.thepoliticalorphanage.com/p/the-great-baby-short...
Also, as I just said, there are less severe short and medium-term problems caused by low birth rates as well so it's not just the looming threat of human extinction I'm concerned about; that's just the biggest and most obvious consequence so it's a convenient counterpoint to people asserting that low birth rates are not a problem at all.
Under another set of criteria (environmental concerns), it's probably a positive.
This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis. It’s an organism not a linear process. It will fix itself later same as it seems to be doing now.
Eh, I think we all know that we could build the housing if we really wanted to.
> This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis.
I agree, but it could a rough ride if the correction is too fast or too far. I think quite a lot of people would prefer the industrial system to keep running, and there is probably a minimum population below which it cannot run.
The argument is - our current economic system can’t handle it.
Well then that’s an argument for changing it.
But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.
Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.
Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.
It's virtually flat for eons, and then in the last 100 years it shoots up like a rocket. We didn't hit the first billion people until 1800, but the 8th billion took only 11 years. (2011-2022)
This rate of exponential growth was never sustainable, and it's normal and natural that it's leveling off now.
If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.
> The pigeon migrated in enormous flocks, constantly searching for food, shelter, and breeding grounds, and was once the most abundant bird in North America, numbering around 3 billion, and possibly up to 5 billion.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Isn't that enough? Imagine a world where a large percentage of the population are in nursing homes. A humane goal for a nursing home is 10:1 24/7. So that means 1 nurse for every 2.5 residents.
Besides that, it's all about the speed of change. Current Korean levels of population halving every generation is going to cause tremendous upheaval.
Shrinking and growing populations aren't necessarily problematic. What's problematic are populations that shrink or grow too quickly. Infrastructure adapted for N people works well for a number close to N, but not so well for 2N or 0.5N.
There aren't too many people besides Elon Musk that are significantly worried that the US's replacement rate is 1.8 compared to the 2.1 constant population level. But numbers much below that do alarm many.
If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.
If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?